By Michael Miner
Gleason is reminiscing at my invitation because he just called it quits after 40 years as a Chicago sports columnist, the last 15 of them at the Daily Southtown. For 12 years he was also a TV celebrity, one of the garrulous sages of The Sportswriters. Asked to remember the war, he doesn’t brood. Instead, he digs up his Silver Star citation.
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It was November 16, 1944, Gleason’s 22nd birthday and first day of combat. “I was lying there under a sapling with little buds on it, and this German I could not see was sniping off the buds. And I thought, ‘This is going on everywhere! On this day people are shooting at each other all over Europe and in the South Pacific.’ I thought, ‘Holy Christ!’”
Before the war he’d been a copyboy at the old Chicago Sun and done some freelance writing on the side for the Southtown Economist (today the Daily Southtown), and when the war took away the Economist’s sports department, the paper’s editor hired Gleason to run it. After the war, Gleason tried and failed to launch a weekly sports newspaper, went back to the Economist, moved to the Chicago American as a picture-caption writer, shifted to sports, and began writing a column in 1961. He wrote that column at the American, at the Sun-Times, and finally at the Southtown.
The Gleasons lived in a six-flat at 71st and Eggleston. Gleason’s father was a blacksmith. “He’d come home from his VFW meeting, and we’d get down on the floor in the kitchen and kill cockroaches. The reason we didn’t use powder, as other people did, is that we had a dog. It was a wonderful thing, being together with my father, kneeling side by side. He’d say, ‘Get that one, Bill. She’s pregnant.’ My job was the light switch–turning the light switch on and off. When the lights were off, that’s when they were scurrying. And when the lights were on, we could go to battle.
This month the young Britannica.com side of the business intended to try something new–an on-line chat with someone in the news. That someone was author Christopher Hitchens, who, to quote from Britannica.com publicity, “claims that charges of war crimes should be brought against Henry Kissinger…who helped shape U.S. foreign policy from 1969 to 1976…. Hitchens claims that Kissinger allowed U.S. bombing in Laos to continue for political purposes rather than war-relative objectives. Hitchens also implicates Kissinger for his involvement in the 1973 military coup in Chile.”
com’s old-line sister company, Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc., the highest value remains impregnable authoritativeness. “We have to be very focused on who we are, what we do, and what we’ve always done,” says Dale Hoiberg, the top editor of the encyclopedia. As for the Hitchens chat, “It’s just not Britannica style, if you ask me.”
